Caught In Your Web
by MissionSword
Summary: Panacea!Power!Taylor meets Skitter!Power!Amy on her first night out. They don't quite hit it off, but after a few more encounters they start working together and exploring the power interaction that lurks in the background of their adventures.
1. Germinal 1-1

A/N: This is a work of fiction. All parallels to real events or other works are entirely in the mind of the reader. Panacea!Power!Taylor meets Skitter!Power!Amy on her first night out. They don't quite hit it off, but after a few more encounters they start working together and exploring the power interaction that lurks in the background of their adventures.

* * *

I'd left a tomato plant on a countertop in the kitchen.

Every day, I would come home from school and feed it scraps of crusty bread, bits of moldy cheese, and sometimes a dead rat from one of the traps around the house.

The plant wasn't just alive, it was alive to my specifications. Running my fingers over it, I could feel a rush of information from the DNA to the cellular to the structural levels. With a mental twist I could manipulate that flow, change the shapes that fractaled up into a single viney growth.

Every day, once the plant was satiated, I would close and hide its mouth and move all that fresh biomass up and out into four perfect tomatoes: juicy, just ripe enough, and already falling apart into cubes.

It was a way to practice my powers, but most of all, it was a way to produce something I could use. After all, tomato sauce tastes better fresh.

* * *

Dad walked into the kitchen to find me pulling lasagna out of the oven. Two crispy layers of extra-brown pasta held an irregular mound of vegetable and meat stuffing.

"Lasagna again?" he asked.

"Yeah." I sighed. "It reminds me—"

"—of Annette?"

"Yeah. I'm sorry. I know I make it a lot, but—"

"It's fine, Taylor. I understand." He swallowed audibly. "I think we both miss her." He walked past me and started setting the table.

I didn't say anything, focusing on shoveling chunks of the lasagna onto two plates, making little heaps. I tore up some of the pasta that had fallen off and used it as garnish.

We sat down to eat.

"How was school, Taylor?" dad asked around a mouthful.

"Same as usual."

He moved some greenish meat from one side of the plate to the other. "The bullies still bothering you?"

"Not so much, no," I said, thinking back to what I'd done. "It's gotten a lot better."

"Since, uh—"

"Yeah." I separated off another bite of lasagna with my knife and spooned it into my mouth. It dissolved, mushy chunks of lightly pureed vegetables giving it an unforgettable texture.

"You know, I could—"

"It's fine."

"Taylor, really—"

"Dad. Please."

He deflated.

The rest of the meal proceeded in awkward but blissful silence. Dad didn't finish his food, throwing the half he hadn't eaten into the garbage can with the previous day's waste.

I could feel an itch under my skin, all-pervasive and encompassing. When I sat in my juice-soaked seat in school and formed bacteria on my skin to clean up the spill and eat up the glucose; when I walked home, brushing my fingers against bushes and dangling tree branches shuddering to imagine how I could take over the whole city if I just lost control and linked all the trees together into a monster; when I bumped into Sophia in the mornings and caught a glimpse of her brain and was so, so very tempted to just tweak it into something more appealing and pliable; those were the times when that itch screamed the loudest.

My power was writhing inside me, demanding to be let out, telling me that it was time. Time! Time to go! Time to do... something. I wasn't sure, it was never very clear, just a vicious and uncomfortable spasming.

Why couldn't things be simple? I would have preferred my power send me an email.

* * *

My closet was open before me, revealing nothing more than rows of shirts and vomit-green hoodies. Boring. Ordinary. Nobody would think to look any closer.

With a flourish, I swept them to a side to reveal my greatest creation, my child, my magnum opus, perhaps my legacy.

A blob of barely differentiated, goo-like flesh. It had it all: simple neural systems branching throughout, the ability to mold itself like living liquid especially when I commanded it through my power (though it was learning on its own), and flash hardening and springiness, allowing me to take hits and survive falls. What had started as a common housefly had become a flesh-mecha.

"Come out, sweetie," I crooned.

With some rustling of shirts and much viscous motion, the glob moved an inch towards me.

"Yes, come on." I motioned with a hand.

It stood in place and wobbled for a moment before jiggling backwards, losing any progress it had made.

"Aw." I stepped forward and plunged an arm in, watching the goo-flesh creep up towards my head. It felt like liquid skin, warm rolls of fat swallowing my arm whole and pulling the rest of me in after.

I reached into the suit with my senses. It was information I was intimately familiar with: groups of platelets repurposed into corded ant-colony-like muscles, trihelical self-modifying DNA, branching almost brain-like structures that somehow managed to avoid centralization. A clunky mess of modifications that even I didn't fully understand at this point.

It flowed up over my mouth, and I constructed an air filtration system on the fly. It flowed over my eyes and glasses, and I built fake one-way eyes. It flowed over my hair, and I let loose a set of blonde locks, letting them grow rapidly from my second scalp.

Another hoodie and a second pair of pants, and I was slipping out of my window and onto the street.

With the powers afforded me by my streetwear and any additional powers I could gain on the fly through the wonders of biomanipulation, I was able to climb buildings, race across roofs, and leap chasms an unassisted human would find at least mildly frightening.

I was looking for something to satisfy that endless churning anxious need. I wanted to punch things, level buildings, touch people and watch as their eyes bugged out and their brains melted and their faces twisted into horrible screaming mockeries. In short, I wanted to find some criminals, defeat them, and be a hero.

I stopped on a rooftop and looked out over the city. Somewhere in this dead, poorly lit night, there had to be some criminal scum looking for a beating. Why couldn't they be near me?

The inside of my suit was moist and hot, so I adjusted it further to absorb sweat and use it as further mass. Ventilation was yet beyond my capabilities. I was sacrificing comfort for power.

A shout rang out below me.

This was my chance. I walked quietly up to the edge of the roof and looked down.

The alley below was dim, lit only from an unseen source directly below me. A beat up, rust-red car sat alone, facing the mouth of the alley, presumably set up for a quick getaway.

As I watched, a man walked out into my field of view, limping towards the car. He held a suitcase in his left hand. Halfway there, he turned his head and spat a "Fuck off!" at something behind him.

"What the fuck do you think you're doing?" a second voice echoed from below.

"Getting out!" the man yelled even as he pulled open the car door.

"It's my fucking car!" the voice yelled back as it turned into a skinhead running at the first man. The skinhead hit the door at full speed, slamming it closed.

The man barely pulled his hand out of the way. "Fuck you! I'm not putting up with this shit any longer."

A few more skinheads walked into my sight and started to spread out. The man looked around, and then he started backing away from the car.

"It's fine. It's fine. I'll just walk," the man said, raising his suitcase defensively in front of his chest.

"No. It's not fine," the first skinhead said. He took a step forward and punched the man in the face.

I flinched, slipping forward a little on the roof. I was only two stories above the ground, so the fall wouldn't even hurt me, but my reflexes set in before I could think. In scrabbling for purchase, I made noise.

The skinheads didn't seem to notice, but their victim glanced at me for a moment—just long enough for another fist to connect with his face. The others had come closer in the meantime. One tripped the victim. Another kicked him. A third stepped on a hand and nudged the suitcase away. By this point, the man was screaming.

I couldn't let this continue. With a deep breath, I stepped over the edge.

I'd tested this before, running up stairs and repeatedly jumping to test my resilience to various heights. I'd managed to get up to five stories before chickening out, but even if I hadn't gone any further, I knew enough to know the shock absorption worked.

And yet, this two story fall was a bigger rush than any of the tests. I dropped right behind the group, briefly catching the glint of a reflection in the leader's reversed sunglasses.

I lunged at him, touching a hand to his neck and knocking him out.

The others had already noticed my arrival; I felt a fist slam against my face. The suit took the brunt of the impact, but I allowed just enough contact through that I could knock this guy out too.

The victim wasn't where I'd last seen him. I looked around. He was escaping in the distraction, hightailing it out of the alley, holding on to a broken hand. He'd left the suitcase behind.

I felt a sharp pain in the back of my leg. The flesh I was wearing told me little about it. Round? Wooden? It didn't matter. It brought me back into the fight.

I ducked under another punch, took a third to the gut. I stumbled at an enemy and barely managed to grab his arm and put him out of commission.

Two remained. I moved to the side, to block their route to the street, and I started walking forward to hem them into the alley's dead end. They backed up in response. None of their attacks had done anything, so I imagined they must have been pretty scared by then.

"Well?" I said, trying to sound intimidating.

The one on the left threw his baseball bat at me and ran. I stepped to the side and tagged him with a hand just as the bat bounced harmlessly off my side. He tripped forward and fell into a doze.

The last skinhead kneeled down and put his hands up in surrender. I high-fived him to guarantee it.

Exhausted, but not quite yet finished, I checked the area for any further attackers. Nothing.

The suitcase lay on the ground, inviting, a matte smear in the dark. Nobody was around. I walked up to it, and shucked it into my suit, arranging it over my back so nobody would notice any strange lumps.

Almost done. I walked out of the alley and looked around for something to call from. I found a someone.

A girl was walking alone a distance away from where I'd exited onto the sidewalk. She shuffled, head down, more sweater than person, seeming completely unaware of her surroundings.

"H-hey!" I yelled, trying to get her attention.

She sped up a little.

"I need some help!" I yelled, again. "Please, just—call the PRT!"

The girl stopped. "The PRT?" she said, her voice somehow carrying even in the evening wind's susurrations.

"I have some criminals secured in an alley. They were beating someone up."

The girl turned around and looked directly at me. "They're not capes."

I felt awkward, like I was imposing on this girl's time. "No. I am though. Uh, I can show you where they are. It's this way. Uh." I pointed in the direction of the alley, and took a step in that direction.

"I believe you."

"Can you call the PRT?"

The girl fumbled a phone out of a pocket. "Okay, I'll call. Are you going to secure them or something?"

"I did, like, I think they won't be able to move for a while. Hopefully long enough. I haven't really done this on a human before."

The girl didn't seem to be listening. She was on looking down at her phone, typing something with a thumb. Raising it to her ear, she turned away from me.

I stopped trying to keep up my end of the conversation, and went back to check on our prisoners. They were still fast asleep, benzodiazepines circulating in their bloodstreams. No problems there.

The car was only mildly scratched up. I pulled the final criminal out of it and laid him on top of the others, making sure to arrange him so he looked comfortably laid out. It wouldn't do to be accused of violence on my first night out fighting the good fight.

I came back to see the girl put the phone away. She turned to me, and I stopped mid-step. We stared at each other awkwardly.

As the awkward standoff dragged on, I noticed my suit squirming without my control. It rubbed against my skin and seemed like it was trying to slip off and to the ground. The biggest motions were wherever she seemed to be examining.

Using my power, I paralyzed the suit and tore open a hole for my mouth. "Can you not?" I said.

I stopped feeling its futile attempts to spasm against my control. "Sorry," she said sheepishly. "Didn't mean to."

"Didn't mean to?" I said as I hopped down and walked up to her. "You could have tripped me down those stairs—Wait. Are you Firefly?"

I'd finally gotten a better look at her. Frizzy brown hair, freckles, brown eyes that glinted in the dim street lights. This was New Wave's ugly stepchild. I'd researched her when I'd first gotten powers, afraid that I wouldn't be able to help much without any flashy power.

"I don't want to fight you," she muttered.

"Uh, me neither."

She fidgeted, looking like she expected something from me.

"Um. What did you do to me earli—"

"Why are you wearing a bug?" she blurted out.

"A bug? This is just my skin."

"It's not."

"Sure—"

"No." She seemed to pick up some steam. "It's a bug. I can sense it."

"Using the eyes you have everywhere?" I wiggled my fingers at her.

"Pretty much. Yeah."

"What did you see?"

"What?"

"Like, what did you see that made you think I'm somehow wearing a bug? It's just skin." I plucked at a bit of my arm to demonstrate. It ploinked quietly, the ripples quickly dissipating.

Firefly flinched. "Definitely a bug. Or a crab, I guess."

"What are you saying? Where are you looking?"

"I—uh, I can see more than just visual stuff?" she said. "Like, the structure of the, um, thing you're wearing is very buggish..."

"Buggish."

"It reminds me of a housefly."

"I guess that's fair."

"Oh?" she said, looking at me expectantly.

"I made it out of a fly. I didn't think it still was one though."

"Well, it seems a lot like a fly to me, even if the shape is a bit... off."

We stood there for an awkward moment, staring past each other.

I spoke first. "Why did it move when you looked at me?"

"I—well, I can't quite control that."

"That? So, can you do more than just look at stuff?"

She shuffled her feet and glanced away. Silence dragged on, broken up only by the Firefly tapping the phone in her hand with a fingernail.

I tried to bring it back. "No, really—"

"First night out?" she asked.

"Oh, uh, yeah."

"Hm," she hummed. "What's your name?"

"Uh, like my cape name? Right, um, not sure yet. I was thinking Membrane?"

"Well then, hello Membrane, I'm Firefly."

"Yeah, you said. Hi?"

Before I could get my bearings, she twisted the conversation again. "So, are you going public?"

"What? Like am I going on TV?"

She gestured at her face. "Like, maskless."

"Oh, sorta. This isn't my real face," I said, trying to fight off a smile. I pinched my forehead and stretched it out a few inches. It plinked back into place.

Firefly watched. Her expression was frustratingly impassive.

"Really? Nothing? I thought that would get more of a reaction. " I deflated a little. "I practiced for like an hour. Stood in front of the mirror. Plink. Plink. Hard to get the noise loud enough. Thought I'd sell myself as a quirky anti-hero, but I guess that dream's dead now."

"I've seen worse."

"Yeah, I guess I'm nothing but a novice." I leaned against a wall and contemplated by failings.

Silence crystallized around us, saccharine and stifling. I drifted, mired in my thoughts. All this preparation, all this practice, hours spent punching rusting hulls to test my costume, days of design, weeks of thinking and imagining and getting ready. Were they all for nothing? Were they just the flailings of an over-eager child, too ready to throw herself into costumed violence?

"You're—well, it's not so bad," Firefly said. "I started at the bottom too."

"You did? But you grew up in a family of superheroes. Caping's in your blood."

"I'm—uh, well, sorta. My powers are really different from theirs."

"Can't fly?"

She grimaced. "Not just that."

"Oh?"

"It's," she said, "complicated. The point is you took down some criminals and saved someone's life."

"And then he ran off."

She shrugged. "Maybe he thought you wouldn't make it. Went to save himself first. They won't always be grateful."

I had a thought. "What if he was a criminal too, and ran off to avoid being taken in?"

"Then at least these five are off the street."

"I guess so."

She sighed. "Just—there's no point in beating yourself up. I know I say that hypocritically, but it's something I'm working on too. You have to do what you have to do. That's all there really is to it."

Her advice was barely more than platitudes, but it still managed to help me relax. I let the conversation sweep me along.

We talked about the gangs, about the Protectorate's failings. I told her about the recent powered scuffle at the docks that had taken place too close to my father for comfort. Personal fact elicited personal fact.

Firefly opened up at first hesitantly, but as soon as she was assured of a sympathetic ear, she really let loose, jumping from advice to anecdote, telling me all about various New Wave adventures and her role in them. A particularly elaborate one turns into a car chase and Firefly herself getting involved.

"And then this guy falls in through the skylight. Lands right next to me. Now, he's on the ground, digging his hand into the asphalt and pulling out liquid looking chunks of it. Clearly, he's a cape.

"Oh no."

"Oh yeah. Even worse, Victoria flies off after the van without saying anything to the rest of us—"

"Did she catch it?"

"Well, first we had to—" She paused. "You should check on them again. They're starting to wake up."

"How do you—right." I stopped myself before I could put my foot further into my mouth.

Our prisoners were still on the ground. None of them looked like they were moving or about to go anywhere.

I touched one, and found that he actually was awake, just keeping his eyes closed. Before he could pull anything, I redosed him and he fell back out of it. The rest followed.

"They should be down for a bit longer," I told Firefly. "How long does this usually take?"

She shrugged. This wasn't particularly high profile, and these were just unpowered randoms. The PRT was probably busy doing something else; maybe someone had downed Lung. She switched the topic back to herself.

Her endless spiel wound on and on, but I persevered. I was learning more about caping in an hour or two than I had in all my weeks of internet research. It was valuable, even if it was hard not to wish the PRT would get here already.

"You know what's the worst? Yesterday, I found an E88 warehouse. I went up to Brandish and—"

"That's so true. I really feel that. Do you know how long it'll be until the PRT gets here? I'm getting a little tired."

"Um. Uh. No. I don't know. Maybe a few more minutes?"

"You were telling a story?" I prompted.

"Oh, yeah. It doesn't really mat—"

"No, go ahead."

"Okay. I, uh, I guess—"

"Don't be shy!"

"So, um, I needed to talk to Brandish. She's team leader, so—"

"I know, I know. What happened?" I looked down the road for any sign of rescue. It was getting way too late.

"The—uh, she—um, well at first I was nervous but then, I—"

"Is that the PRT? I think that's them," I said, straining my ears for any hint of sirens or cars moving. Absolute dead silence.

"Is it?" she asked hopefully, as done with standing around as I was. "Maybe I should get going."

"And leave this all to me? No thanks. And anyways, I'm enjoying talking to you."

"Oh. Uh, really?" She looked oddly hopeful.

I smiled at her. "Yeah!"

"Um. Thanks."

"No problem! Can I ask you a question?"

"Yeah, uh, sure."

"So what were you doing out here—"

"Oh! I was just taking—" she interrupted.

"You didn't let me finish. What were you doing out here, _at night_?"

"Just—just taking a walk. I couldn't—"

"Where to? Visiting someone?"

"No, just wanted to clear my head, I guess," she said.

"That's nice. Seen anything interesting?"

"Well, there was that—"

"Awesome!"

She opened and then closed her mouth.

"You're really cool, you know? Even for a professional hero. I thought you'd be more, uh, standoffish or something."

"Oh. Thanks?"

"Hey, do you think we could meet again?"

"I'm not sure that—"

"Great! You go to Arcadia, yeah? How about we meet at Bredsea's Coffee and Tea right after school lets out?"

"Oh, um, I—"

"Yeah, I don't go to Arcadia, I go to Winslow, so it'll take me a bit to get over there. Don't worry about it so much, it'll take me like fifteen minutes."

"Sorry, I actually—"

"You're really nervous? No need, really. We've gotten along fine so far. I'm sure it'll only get better from here."

Firefly didn't respond.

"Hey, you still there?" I asked, worried that I'd said something wrong. Ever since Emma had betrayed me, I'd been wary of social situations, never quite sure if my attempts at friendship would be turned against me.

She put up a hand. "They're here."

I crouched into a fighting stance. "I'm ready. How'd they contact backup anyways?"

"What? No, I mean the PRT is here."

"Are they on our side?"

She looked right at me. "Yes."

I relaxed, but not all the way. I'd learned from previous heroes' failures, and I knew that it always paid to be wary. "How do you know?"

A van pulled in, cutting off her response. PRT troopers piled out of the back.

* * *

"May I use the restroom?" I asked.

I took my backpack with me, letting the suit slither out of it and envelop me as I took a back hallway and left school.

Thus armed and disguised, I stashed my stuff inside a tree. The wood flowed over and closed after it, leaving it unblemished. With a little more concentration, I tinted the leaves a little redder, in case I forgot which tree it was later.

I reached the coffee shop right as the school day ended.

I sat down only to feel a hand grab my shoulder. It depressed my outer flesh, pushing it further than it should have, but still not enough to get through to my real body and hurt me.

"What are you doing to my sister?" a voice hissed in my ear.

The flesh on my shoulder began to slowly deform around the offending appendage, shaping itself to her fingers and flowing over them. "Your sister?"

"Amy. Firefly. My sister."

I turned my head to find Victoria Dallon staring at me angrily.

A/N: Thank you to my betas hoaryphew, papamars, ObjectiveSpear, and to a much lesser extent B453B411C4P.


	2. Germinal 1-2

Glory Girl's hand was still stuck to my outer shoulder.

I could feel the information from the malleable outer flesh she deformed change. Structures rearranged and took on new semi-stable forms. Chemical messengers adapted to stress. Tiny sensors took in light, and I interpreted it as data. Through it all, I could just make out the shift in her pulse.

Her heart rate was elevating, her hands twitching, pheromones signaling one thing: she wasn't just here to berate me. She was here to fight.

"Glory Girl," I stated.

"Membrane."

"What did Firefly tell you?"

"Enough."

"So, are we going to sit here all day, your hand on my shoulder? Or are—"

"We're gonna fight. And then you'll leave my sister alone."

"I don't think so," I said and let the flesh of the suit around her hand flow out, bits of it picking at and dissolving the material of my shirt underneath. All I needed was a little bit of skin contact, and Glory Girl would be out for the count.

Then I'd talk to Firefly alone and we'd figure this whole misunderstanding out.

She noticed the slight shift, and pulled her hand back with a massive slorp, her strength outdoing anything my flesh suit could do to keep her there.

"Well, _I_ do think so," she growled, and she pulled her other hand back, balling it into a fist.

I'd never been in a cape fight before, but in the three months since I'd found myself empowered, I'd thought about it quite a bit. My powers were ridiculously versatile. Touch anything organic and I'd gain full awareness and control over it. Chemical messengers became as extra limbs, easy to tweak and change.

I could have built incredible weapons. Long range gasses to flood my enemies and bring them down, modified animals obedient only to me to attack from a distance, plants that grew over cities and subsumed them until the world was nothing but my creation and those who lived within my domain.

But all of those came with the same problem: lack of control.

An animal could get out into the wild, breed and become dominant, choking out wildlife, destroying ecosystems.

A plant allowed to grow indefinitely could spread like a cancer, roots burying so deep they could never be unearthed and destroyed. Worse, modifications intended to keep it alive would also keep it from being regulated by nature's usual processes. A massive population overshoot engendered by a single humongous organism, leading to a crash and severely decreased carrying capacity. Soil erosion. Devastation. Death.

A virus designed to knock out a single target could become corrupted. Cells divide, transcription errors occur, mutations propagate. Losing its lock to that one person, it might spread, jumping from person to person, city to city, country to country, until the world falls apart, leaving nothing but me and Madagascar.

I didn't dare let any of my creations out of my control, so I'd gone and invested all my ideas into my suit and then kept it close, letting me stay in touch with my power at all times.

Without it, I felt merely human, little more than a ragdoll puppeted by a paltry 650 muscles, many of them not fully independent. A bare shell. A static interface I couldn't even rewrite. A few clumsy buttons that I was forced to mash in order to make jerky barely controlled movements. No precision, no nothing.

But clothed in my creation, and having planned beforehand, I was ready for a fight, and able to respond in real time.

The suit began to inflate before her fist even hit me, filling with air and fluid, squishy wetness suspending me within like an overgrown fetus.

Glory Girl's punch smashed me through the table, the cafe's outer fencing, and out onto the road. I bounced once before settling into a roll that took me under a fast-moving truck.

I slowed down on the other side of the road and stood up, stopping traffic.

Even with the goo, shock absorption, and rudimentary exoskeleton, I'd felt that. One of my arms was lightly bruised, the pain masked by the cooling sensation of viscous protective liquid.

The pavilion I'd just vacated was strewn with bits of shredded chair, torn up fence, and knocked over tables. A waitress stood off to the side, looking at the wreckage with a resigned expression. Glory Girl floated in the very center of it.

"Are you just going to break things? Not even hear me out?" I shouted back at her.

"I can afford it," she said.

"Why are we doing this?"

She answered by shooting right at me, fist extended.

I twisted within the suit, letting my real body avoid the attack entirely. Her fist punched through the flapping outer flesh that I'd left behind, puncturing and tearing it. Fluid leaked out as I frantically pulled the suit back together around the skeletal structure inside, reorienting it to match where I was facing.

I held my hands up, trying to placate her. "Glory Girl, please. I've done nothing to your sister," I said.

"Then why's she coming here?" she yelled as she dove at me again.

"I asked her to come?" I suggested.

"Ha! There you have it!"

"Have—" I ducked under a punch only to get a kick to the side that threw me off the street and into a building. "—what?"

"You manipulated her!" she yelled, floating a few feet away.

"I _just_ asked her!"

"You manipulated her with words!"

"I talked to her!"

She let out an inarticulate scream of rage and dove at me again.

I jumped over her attempt, leaving her to chip the wall, and started running. Musculo-skeletal structures in the flesh suit assisted me in my run, moving me further and faster than I could have moved on my own.

I made it less than half a block before she tackled me.

We rolled on the ground for a few seconds, futilely clawing at each other. My hands slid against her. Her hands managed only to grasp globs of flesh that melted whenever she pulled at them.

She gave up, slipping her arms around me, and grabbing me in a big hug.

"Are we do—" I started saying.

She pulled me up from the ground and into the air. We kept rising, up multiple floors, until we'd passed the tops of the tallest buildings around. For hundreds of vertical feet, she continued to rise. Realizing the futility of trying to damage her, I spent the time reinforcing the bottom of my suit, moving mass down until I was pear-shaped. By the time we stopped, I could see the bay emptying out into the ocean, water disappearing into the horizon.

She dropped me.

As seconds passed, I curled up into a ball, letting myself slip through pseudo-amniotic fluid into the narrow top of my suit's current configuration. The lower structure stratified into bubbles of fluid and air. Biological bubble wrap folded over and over, oriented toward the point of impact.

When I hit the ground, the bottom layer burst, spraying colorless liquid all over a parking lot. I felt my momentum caught as if by a trampoline and then bounced up lightly.

Opening eyeholes back up so I could see, I found myself face to face with Glory Girl.

"Did you just try to kill me?" I yelled at her.

"You're a flesh blob. You would have been fine!"

"No, I almost wasn't!"

She stopped in mid-air. "Well, so-rry. I thought you could take it."

"Can we just stop and talk this out? I'm not a fucking villain!"

"Then why are you acting like one?"

I didn't get a chance to respond before she was flying at me again.

We crashed through a wall, wood splintering around us. My suit popped further, warm liquid splattering out and left behind as we went through another wall.

Another wall shattered as Glory Girl stayed her course, using me like a giant boxing glove to damage warehouse after warehouse. With each subsequent crash, I lost a little more mass. If I ran too low, I'd end up vulnerable and likely dead.

Sucking in microorganisms from the air wouldn't be enough. I tried to pull in and process as much shattered wood as I could. Production of protozoans armed with appropriate enzymes ramped up. Cellulose became cellodextrins became glucose which fed into the machinery of growth, rebuilding the suit slowly.

With enough time, I could convert any biomass into anything I needed, but at the rate Glory Girl was flying, I'd never get the chance. I needed a way to get her to stop.

I let the suit slip around her, becoming looser and slimier. She had a little bit of a grip on my real body, a left arm in a half circle that blocked my way. I began to squirm loose, doing everything I could think of to trick her grip and escape.

Parts of the suit shifted mass to other parts, leaving it lopsided. Density increased where I wanted her to believe I was, at the cost of less protection around my legs.

She stopped suddenly in the middle of a warehouse and grabbed my head, slamming it into the concrete floor.

The cushioning saved me, cracking slightly. I began to heal the exoskeleton, letting tendrils of collagen shoot towards each other around calluses that I reabsorbed almost as soon as I'd finished forming them.

Right in front of me, I could see swirls of white powder and the vague shape of someone pulling a gun.

Glory Girl's face interrupted my view. "Well?" she yelled.

"Welwat?" I choked out through the sweet fluid draining out of my throat.

Some of the white dust landed on my suit and absorbed, its chemical structure unknown to me, but based on the effect my power expected it to have on the body was probably cocaine. If not for the suit, I'd be breathing it in.

Glory Girl didn't seem affected.

She slammed my head into the ground again, undoing some of my repair work and jostling my real body.

I shrunk in on myself, ducking out of the head of the suit and filling it with new organ structures and solid plates, doing my best to help it imitate the same sound and weight and feel as it smashed into the ground.

Every impact was accompanied by yells from my tormentor. I couldn't understand any of it, especially through the shockwaves making their way to my head and the crunchy sound of skeleton on ground.

Cocaine became supplemented by smoke and heat.

I curled up into a ball as I moved into the lower end of the suit, commanding the other side to take on a pseudo-skeletal structure.

Microscopic bits of iron-mineralized chitin traveled in repurposed phagocytes. They'd been spread out to aid in flexibility, slowly forming over time in every part of the body, ready to be deployed on a moment's notice. As I squeezed myself lower, the hollow space was taken up by new skeletal structures, armored panels, and balloons of liquid to give it all weight.

Particulate matter and smoke toxicity were affecting the outer skin of the suit. Layers of cells died, falling before the onslaught of increasingly dense smoke.

Glory Girl had eyes only for me. She paused in her ministrations and pulled up the fake head I'd created. I synthesized hematocytes and suspended them in blood plasma, letting them pulse out of widening slits in the neck. I let a shard of bone get caught in the stream and push its way out of the skull. The suit mimicked taking in a shuddering, wet breath.

Glory Girl let go and pulled back. "Shit."

The bottom of the suit was a large pile of seemingly undifferentiated biomass, my curled up form hidden inside.

I let the fake gasp for one last breath before killing all its cells. They died in waves, starting from the head and flowing towards me. I cut off the apoptotic march right before it reached the pile containing me, rendering the fake half-body inert and cutting it off from the rest.

I rose, pulling up flesh, solidifying, rearranging, and reforming into an approximate recreation of my suit. Then, I ran, hoping the smoke would obscure my path.

I dove through the hole we'd made to enter and rolled onto the grass, pulling in as much of it as I could along the way. Weeds and worms and wilted flowers: all were subsumed with the assistance of my power.

Behind me, the warehouse burned.

I glanced back as I sprinted and spotted a screaming Glory Girl flying at me with a dumpster held by a lip. She stopped in mid-air, letting the dumpster keep moving, swinging it around once before letting it fly free right at me.

I dropped to the ground. The suit inflated to soften the blow and protect me, catching the lip of the dumpster and sending it spinning over me. Trash rained down. I absorbed as much as I could: food waste, maggots, rats.

The suit was approaching car size, its internal structures buried under protective outer layers. I redirected them to build muscles, biological pistons, fleshy hydraulics. This needed to end. It was time to turn this around and counterattack.

Glory Girl hovered a few feet away, examining my form and looking for weaknesses.

"Membrane!" a girl yelled.

I coiled my massive double-body in further, tensing it in preparation to lunge.

"Membrane!" she yelled again. I recognized the name and the voice suddenly. Firefly was calling my cape name.

"What?" I managed, just barely keeping myself from rushing at Glory Girl.

Glory Girl didn't give me that same courtesy. She took advantage of my distraction and dove at me.

I attempted to duck under her blow, but my suit didn't respond. Instead of a precise and controlled movement, it spasmed, muscles activating seemingly at random and without my direction.

My chin squished into the bottom of the head part of the suit as my head was jostled by the unexpected resistance. I felt fluid leaking around my neck and trickling down my scalp. It stung my eyes as it dripped down to my mouth.

Glory Girl's punch pressed into the supposedly brute-proof suit, failing to be absorbed by systems currently going haywire. The force of the blow transferring to my abdomen, knocking my breath out and stumbling me. I tripped backwards just as I felt a part of the suit squeeze around my ankle. Flesh and meat and almost-liquid biomass sloshed down around me.

"What the fuck!" I yelled as I hit the ground, my words garbled by the fluid. I spit it out.

Glory Girl hovered above me, looking down right into the suit's eyes. "One more move, and I—"

I ignored her. "Firefly! Did you do this?"

"Flesh Bitch!" Glory Girl spat. "I was talking to you!"

"Firefly," I enunciated, freezing the front part of my suit as best I could. "Could you please?"

Muscles seized up and released, twitching finally ceasing. My suit stopped spasming just in time for me to hear Glory Girl yelling again. "Look, you creepy bitch, I want your writhing, faux-human paws off my sister. She doesn't need you whispering—"

"Victoria! Please!" Firefly shouted.

Glory Girl glared at her sister. "What?"

"Can you calm down for a moment?"

"I'm trying to help. I'm telling her—"

"I've got it handled. She's not doing anything to me."

"But—"

"Can just believe me? Please? I'll be fine, I promise."

"You promise?"

"Yes."

"Okay. Alright." Glory Girl took a deep breath and lowered herself to the ground, her feet finally touching the ground. She stood there staring at the two of us. "So? What now?"

I still felt tense, the expectation of another attack haunting me.

She watched impassively, an eyebrow raised, not even twitching as the wail of sirens grew louder.

"The warehouses," Firefly said.

Glory Girl and I both looked towards the warehouses we'd fought through. A whole section of them was on fire, spewing thick choking black smoke. People were running out of them.

Glory Girl shrugged. "They're ABB."

"You knew before you attacked?" Firefly asked. Her face painted a picture. Lips turned up at a corner, a slight squint to her expression as she tried to pre-empt her sister's next excuse. A lock of frizzy brown hair dangled in front of her face, having long refused any attempts to be blown off, and always returning no matter how often she swept it to the side.

"They were filled with cocaine." Glory Girl's features contrasted sharply with her sister's. Where Firefly looked real, all human angles and imperfections, she looked like she'd been cast from a mold. Smooth plastic features deforming into infuriatingly unwrinkled expressions. Frowns drawn precisely by computer and preserved in clear glass.

Firefly's face closed off further, short eyelashes lowering just enough to barely fuzz my view of her pupils. Her mouth pinched inward, pulling her nose a millimeter in and lowering her columella. "You didn't know that before you flew in," she said, ending the sentence with a furrowing of her brows.

"Eh," she said, and stretched her arms out to the sides, lifting slightly into the air. "It all works out in the end."

"Victoria." Firefly was staring up at her sister. Her teeth were grit together, masseters bulging out the skin around the back of her slightly lopsided lower jaw. "We need to fix this. You need to talk to the PRT."

"Ugh." Glory Girl was even further up in the air now, spinning slightly as if to thereby deflect Firefly's words, redirect them into the ground where they couldn't affect her. "Alright."

Firefly raised an untrimmed eyebrow, emphasizing the arch and, by virtue of the contrast, making it clear just how sunken her eyes were.

"Alright!" Glory Girl rotated in mid air until she was pointing at the warehouses. She sped off.

I turned to Firefly. "What the hell?"

"She's like that." Firefly shrugged.

"Not that. I'm talking about how you tripped me."

"I wanted to stop the fight."

"She could have killed me!" Talking to Firefly was a little frustrating sometimes. She just didn't seem to understand the consequences of her own actions or what sort of pain she was causing me.

"Well—"

"No! Your sister is insane, Firefly!" I noticed I was shaking. The pressure of the situation having lifted, I found myself at the mercy of my own anxiety. I needed to sit down, lie down, something. I stumbled a few feet to a wall and slumped against it.

"Are you okay?"

"No, no I'm not okay. I just narrowly avoided death like five times in quick succession." I took a deep breath and let myself slip further down the wall until I was sitting down. "Holy shit."

She awkwardly shuffled closer. "Uh, I'm sorry. She's—"

I looked up at her. "And you!"

"Um—"

"You tripped me. Don't think I've forgotten."

"I also stopped her—"

"This is school all over again."

"School?"

"I—" I took an even deeper breath and tried to steady my nerves. "I'm bullied at school. There are three of them."

I was tearing up. Firefly's visage started to blur in my vision. I let the tears absorb into my suit. She didn't say anything, just watching.

"One used to be my best friend, until she turned on me."

Firefly stood there, staring. I wanted her to say something, to react, to do anything other than to just take in my pain and discard it as if it meant nothing.

"Turned on me! Can you imagine!" I was still shaking. "Can you?"

"Not… really?"

"So, I'm pretty sensitive when someone seems friendly and then turns on me. I'm afraid, Firefly. Afraid that it'll happen again. I'll give someone my trust, and they'll mangle it, tear me apart."

"I'm sorry."

"I've heard that so often," I said, breaking eye contact and letting my head fall back down.

"I could, uh, make it up to you?" she said hesitantly.

"Really?" Maybe Firefly wasn't so bad after all. Perhaps the possible friend I'd seen the other night could still develop. "I mean, well, you shouldn't. I have to handle this on my own."

"No, no, really." She was warming up to the idea, seeing the possibility of really helping me. "My mom's a lawyer, and I'm a superhero. We can help."

I looked back up at her. "I'd like that." It'd go a way towards assuaging my doubts about her and making up her attack earlier.

We stayed like that for a moment. Her standing and fidgeting. Me sitting and wiping away tears. At least the wall when cushioned by the mass of my suit was mostly comfortable.

Eventually I broke the silence. "How'd you find us anyways?"

"Oh, uh, followed the trail of destruction, also tracked her cell phone."

"You can track her cell?"

"Well—"

"Can you track mine?"

"No—"

"What's the difference?"

"Mom—"

"So your mother can track me?"

"No, not unless you joined our plan for some reason."

"Oh, right. That's good to know."

She shrugged.

I tried to think of something else to say. "You know, the suit's very responsive to you."

"I guess so."

"It's not a guess. The thing almost seems to like you."

"It's probably just a weird power interaction," she said.

"I'm not convinced. Either you're doing something on purpose, or this thing actually likes you, somehow."

"I'm not doing anything," she denied, more vehemently this time. My arm twitched involuntarily.

I stood up. "Sure you are, unless you wanna tell me that this suit that I constructed and can feel every little bit of has evolved a consciousness beyond my control or ability to sense and now has the capacity for reason and attachment necessary to react to you."

"Seriously, I'm—"

"Oh cut it out. This thing is turning towards you, like a flower opening up to sun," I said, starting to advance on her. The suit stiffened a little, slight tremors running down from the head to the mass of meat that made up the bottom half.

"Please—"

"No. Look, I don't want to have to take this as an attack or anything. You're otherwise pretty cool," I said as I pointed a finger in her direction. The finger shook a little, refusing to be fully directed. "But it's mighty suspicious that this only happens around you."

I took another step towards her, and the suit started squirming harder. The skin of the top jerked to the left, slipping around my head and burying my nose in the cheek. The space between me and the suit began to fill with thick viscous liquid. I tried to take a breath and only managed to aspirate some of the sweet fluid that suspended me in the suit.

My world was nothing but the painful sensation of burning lungs and the faint redness of light filtered through skin. I tried to yell, to tell her to stop, to signal my distress, but I only managed to sputter. Bubbles formed where my voice wouldn't and were swept away with the continued involuntary motion of my suit.

I tried to tear a hole for air with my powers. Cells migrated away from hastily prepared perforations. Custom viruses destroyed cell walls and weakened internal structures. The friction of rapid uncontrolled motion finished the job, skin stretching and separating.

It wasn't enough. Shuddering muscles forced wet flesh back into my mouth and nose, smothering me. My vision began to darken, corners moving in.

I pulled and twisted and tore at my prison. I synthesized bacteria and rotted the skin, my own creation destroying itself to give me life.

Dying meat sloughed off my head and pooled around my neck.

I hacked up what was left in my throat and took deep, shuddering breaths. The air tasted necrotic, the sickly taint of death still coating my tongue.

The rest of the suit was frozen in place, immobile and safe.

"Membrane? Are you alright?"

I looked up to see Firefly staring at me.

My voice came out weak and scratchy. "I just—couldn't breathe."

She gestured at her face. "Your uh—"

"It'll—" I coughed again and a glob of thick liquid came out. "—be okay."

"Good, good, but, uh, your—"

"I can fix it," I snapped, before coughing up another phlegmy mass. "Thanks for the concern, but—" It was her fault, she knew it, and now she was just trying to help. "I'll be fine. Thank you."

"Your face?"

I touched my face with a still enhanced hand. "Yes? Seems fine other than the goo."

"I can see it."

"Oh?" I felt it again. The same wide mouth, the same large eyes, the same public—

"Capes," she started.

"Oh," I said. "Right. You revealed my identity."

I kept my hand in front of my face and had it web up, flat panels of cartilage streaked with bone growing outwards to hide me. I backed away from her.

"I didn't mean—" she started, but I was already stumbling backwards into an alley. I didn't dare pull the top of my suit back up, not while still in her range.

My facade felt like it was crumbling. Firefly knew what I looked like now. She knew that I wasn't just Membrane, mysterious hero, saviour, unassailable flesh giant.

In seeing my face, she'd reduced me back to Taylor Hebert, lonely loser, bullied student, slow failure. The weight of my past—of the identity that my life had forced on me—rose from my gut and began to smother me. I was choking again, but this time it was my own anxiety forcing its way down my throat and taking away my breath.

I turned and ran.


	3. Germinal 1-3

I ran.

I ran and ran and ran.

I ran and leapt over a tree root breaking through the concrete ground of the warehouse district, catching myself just in time.

I ran through smoke and past buildings and around wrecked boats and over torn up pavement.

I ran from Firefly. I ran from Glory Girl.

I ran, and with each pump of my legs I pushed my anger, my rage, and my helplessness into the movements, into the suit, and into the ground.

I ran to run. I ran to escape. I ran to release.

They called Glory Girl a hero, but what I'd seen had been nothing short of insanity.

This was far beyond the time I'd sat on Madison's backpack and her pen had poked me in the thigh. This was a worse harm than even Sophia's petty shoves when I walked into her in the hallway. This was almost murder!

My vision blurred with betrayal.

Eventually, I stopped running. Not because I was tired—the suit took care of that—and not because I'd calmed down—my blood still simmered—but because I was so far away, had taken so many twists and turns, that I could hear nothing around me. No pursuers.

I was alone again, just like always.

The wind whistled between warehouses, the murmurings of an unhelpful ghost come to haunt me. In front of me, a phone handset dangled from a payphone box and clinked quietly against its metal casing.

I sagged, letting myself rest against the moist inner surface of the suit, a freefall into a liquid embrace, the closest thing I had to being hugged.

Changes creeped into the suit, measures I took to disguise myself and go home without being recognized: the blonde hair turned brown, heels grew an inch, facial structure and musculature changed until it was unrecognizable.

I walked up the payphone, first looking around to confirm that nobody else was around or watching. It was time to put things right. I didn't have any coins, but with my power, I would make do.

Grabbing the headset in my left hand and putting it up to my ear, I focused on the fingertips of my right hand. The outer flesh merged into a mitten. Waves of tissue made their way up my forearm and flowed into the mitten, elongating it into a tentacle that grew until it snaked into the coin slot.

The tendril of flesh went down a wide, thin passage, sliding over metal disks, squeezing past a coin gate, and infiltrating the coin box. I felt out the inner workings of the machine, mentally reinterpreting structural changes and limits to my power as a map of the inside.

I couldn't quite tell how the mechanism worked, but I didn't expect that to matter too much. I began to shape coins out of cartilage at various places in the machine, push at the mechanism with smaller branching tendrils, to pull at the flap that closed off the coin box. No dial tone, no effect on the sound coming from the headset.

Whatever it did to validate purchases was beyond my capabilities to detect, and I didn't know how to synthesize the materials necessary for coins.

I formed bone struts in the slight gap leading to the coin box. The flap began to open slowly.

Lower down, I reshaped the inside of the tentacle into a tube. It reached for coins and pulled at them with tiny cilia, larger functional tails, moving pads of keratin that tried to grab at coins with Van der Waals forces. I created small, lung-like structures in my outer right upper arm and used the suction they provided to create negative pressure to try to pull a few coins up past the flap.

The opening snapped closed, and no coins came through.

I could have painstakingly dissolved a coin or two, transported them molecule by molecule up to the sensor, and rebuilt them, but I didn't have the time for that, having already wasted many minutes here already. My mind played scenarios of Glory Girl flying in from above and pounding me into a paste, finally succeeding in killing me. With her sister's surveillance power and ability to find spots nobody else would even think of, it would be trivial for them to ensure that nobody ever found my body.

Ever smaller tendrils snaked out, permeating the machine and creating a web of connections, letting me trace out where individual wires went. Perhaps I could apply an electrical current somewhere.

Electrocytes formed at the ends of tentacles, specialized organs usually found in electric eels now literally at my fingertips. Applying currents to various parts of the machine did nothing more than generate a slight buzzing in the headset.

All this time, I was searching and mapping. Eventually I found what I needed: two separated terminals in the coin shoot.

Shards of bone grew around them, pushing them together and creating a bridge. It wasn't stable enough, so I recombined my electrical apparatus and upped the voltage, directing current at the join and pulsing it.

The metal welded together, and I heard a soft click in the payphone.

I extricated my suit from the machine. Osteoclasts broke down bone tissue, and minerals were reabsorbed. Tendrils of malleable, muscular flesh disentangled from wires and mechanisms. Fluid was reabsorbed, and the inside of the machine cleaned out, leaving no trace of my visit beyond the welded terminals.

My suit shucked back into itself and reformed to look human again.

As I dialed 911, I realized that payphones didn't charge for emergency calls.

"Hello?" I said into the phone.

It buzzed for a moment before a bored voice crackled to life. "911, where is your emergency?"

"I'm Ta—Membrane."

"Where is your emergency?" the voice repeated.

"Oh, I was just attacked, but, uh—"

"Where?"

"No, see, I'm a cape."

"Ma'am, we can't help you unless you—"

"Can you connect me to the Protectorate?"

"Are you under 18?"

"Why does it—Yes, yes, I am. Can I talk to the Protectorate?"

"The Protectorate? We can patch you through to the PRT hotline."

"Oh, uh, sure."

The line went dead for a moment. A click. A few beats of hold music.

"You've reached the PRT emergency hotline. Where is your emergency?"

"I'm Membrane, new independent hero?"

"Ma'am, is this an emergency?"

"I was just attacked by Glory Girl," I blurted out, fed up with this farce of a hotline.

There was a pause on the other end. "Could you repeat that?"

"I. Was. Just. Attacked. By. Glory. Girl," I said again, enunciating each word carefully.

"Where are you, ma'am?"

"I'm a cape."

"Are you under the age of 18?"

"Yes!"

"Are you presently in danger?"

"Probably not. But I was! I almost died!"

"I'll transfer you to a recruiter. They'll be able to help with your situation."

The line beeped twice and then swelled with pleasant hold music. Just as I started to get into it and bob my head, it cut out.

"Armsmaster here."

"Hello?" I said.

"Hello. This is Armsmaster."

"Uh."

"You've reached Armsmaster. Who is calling?"

I gathered my wits about me, pulling them into formation and hoping they wouldn't wander off again. I'd need every last one if I wanted to do this right. "I'm Membrane. New independent hero. I'm calling to report a parahuman assault."

The line was silent for a moment. "I'm very sorry to hear you had to go through that. Are you under 18?"

"Yes. I'm under 18," I snapped impatiently.

"The Wards program—"

"Look, I'm not—just can we talk about that later? I'd like to report this assault, and I have no idea if they're still chasing me."

"Are you in danger right now?"

"No, probably not, but who knows if this phone call drags on another four hours."

"Of course. Could you describe your attacker? Did you catch any identifying costume or facial features?"

"It was Glory Girl."

"...of New Wave?" I could just imagine the cynicism worming its way across his face, its instinct honed by long years in the field until it was a knife that sliced any and every hint of smile off his face.

"Yes. She attacked me in public at the Bredsea's by Arcadia."

"I'm very sorry to hear you had to go through that." His voice was monotone, a seeming formality, but if I could have seen his face, I think perhaps I would have understood: only a tone that gravelly could be the whetstone which had so sharpened his cynicism. His emotions had been sliced in twain, and in doubling had lost their essence. He was naught more than a servant of duty now.

"Yes, thank you. She tore through a lot of property too and might have hurt some bystanders, but most of all she tried to kill me. Multiple times."

"She attempted to murder you? Was it premeditated?"

"Yes, she did, and probably? It was a rush of her trying to beat my head into concrete and flying me through buildings. I don't have a directly defensive power. If I hadn't taken measures that _she couldn't have known about_ then I'd be dead right now."

"I'm very sorry to hear—"

"Yes, you said. Look, do I need to do anything else to get her arrested? Like, this is insane. She shouldn't be on the streets, let alone a hero!" My voice was getting hysterical by the end, my face having morphed into a rictus of exasperation.

A quiet electrical hum took over the line, cutting off just as Armsmaster began speaking again. "You did survive."

"Barely! That doesn't even mean that much. This is a clear abuse of power and a violation of the social contract!"

"We talked to Glory Girl."

"Oh? Did she say she attacked me?"

"No. She didn't mention you at all. Claimed it was an altercation between her and the ABB. That Lung had gotten involved."

"Lies! Did you not even question any suspects or look for cell phone footage?"

"Glory Girl, despite her string of minor incidents and disciplinary history is well regarded in the community. The officers on site must have decided there was no point in looking further."

"Ask the waitress."

"The waitress?"

"At Bredsea's."

"We'll look into it. If what you say is true, Glory Girl will be off the streets and in our care by the end of the day. I'm very sorry to—"

"Thank you, thank you, thank you."

"Yes." A pause. "You're welcome. Is there any way to contact you?"

I didn't want to give out my personal phone in case they tracked me.

"I'll swing by in a few days to PRT HQ and see if you need me? If the Wards can help me escape this sort of thing in the future, I'd be interested, but currently I'm unconvinced based on how you let Glory Girl do this for so long."

"Noted. I look forward to pitching you the Wards program then."

The receiver clicked. I hung up.

I felt a little better. The PRT's obvious system corruption grated on me, but that would have to wait. At least one villain masquerading as a hero would be off the streets, at least temporarily.

Time to go home.

In front of me lay a single leatherbound suitcase, gleaming in the early morning light.

These were the spoils of my first night out. Though that had been two nights ago, I'd only remembered them now. I'd woken up early and—not knowing what it contained and wary of being harmed—donned my suit for protection.

I'd hauled the suitcase out of my closet and set it on my bed. Now I stood before it and couldn't look away.

A tendril of my suit slithered forward. It latched onto the lock and slipped around it. Acid dissolved metal, and bone plating grew in the latch to pry it open.

The case opened with a pop.

Velvet padding covered the inside, absorbing collisions and cushioning its cargo: a single vial of glimmering liquid that shimmered and sang in the night. It was mesmerizing, a glittering cornucopia of tremulous light.

Before I could hold it back, the suit tendril shot forward and shattered the glass in its comfortable velvet pillow.

The incandescent liquid spilled, splashing all over the case.

I frantically tried to sweep it up, but the flesh of my suit seemed to be acting almost beyond my control, nudging itself towards the fluid and absorbing it, cleaning it up by taking it in.

New, unrecognizable materials pulsed through flesh and shot up the tentacle, jumping from cell to structure to everything there was. The liquid was all gone, and my suit was convulsing, undergoing some sort of metamorphosis.

Wary from my experience nearly drowning in my own creation the other day, I tore at the back with my powers and pushed back with my hands, falling out of the thing with a wet thump.

It stayed standing, even as I dragged myself backwards away from it.

It thrummed, vibrated, and suddenly bent over, empty hands flapping at its head. It shrunk in on itself and suddenly went limp. I poked it with a foot, but nothing happened.

I poked it with a finger, letting my power reach out and course through it, feeling out the changes. It had been transformed, shifted in ways I didn't quite understand.

The DNA had split and tangled, branching off from nucleotides into complicated self-folding chains of unrecognizable acids, the old trihelical structure unzipped into fractals and chaotic swirls. I could only catch glimpses of each bit as structures remade themselves too fast to follow. The suit's biological processing had gone into overdrive, phagocytes repurposed into larger scale processes that consumed and remade themselves constantly, an ouroboric cycle of self-expression.

The whole assemblage seemed to be pulling in every source of energy it could to fuel this orgy of recreation.

It was slowly moving from loose collection of cells held together by sheer force of will to a tightly controlled civilization of microorganisms, the change sweeping across like a billboard of individually rotating squares all flipping in a wave from one side to the other. As the new paradigm reached each cell, the cell stuttered for a moment, changed, and fell down a new post-evolutionary path.

I looked up to see my alarm clock spelling out the time in big red numerals. It was way too late.

The suit went in my backpack. It would have to undertake its journey alone. I threw on some clothes and ran downstairs to catch the bus. I didn't even have time to breakfast.

Dad should have called me downstair ages ago, but he hadn't. His car was long gone, leaving almost not trace of his morning, not even a cold breakfast left for me in his wake.

Perhaps he stood at the bottom of the stairs, thinking about helping his daughter get to school on time, and eventually realized he didn't have the courage to break through the very walls of non-interaction he'd built up over years of neglect.

I didn't think this was the whole story. As his failures piled up, multiplied, and became multi-disciplinary, it became harder and harder to explain it all away with mere incompetence.

He was self-absorbed to degree that had doomed our family and my relationship with him. He'd let himself get lost in his thoughts, wandering empty labyrinthine corridors in search of a woman long dead. He'd been lost of years, unable to live in the present, unable to open his eyes and see what was right in front of him, unable to notice that I needed him now more than ever.

He barely tried to tread water, and he never tried to push me towards land.

He drowned. He drowned in his memories. He drowned in his abandoned responsibilities. He drowned in his tears. He drowned in the two dollar beers he brought home every day, sitting on the couch wallowing in misery and self-hate and failure, discarding bottle after bottle by the couch and not even bothering to take them out before the flies began to circle.

He was the only father I had.

And I had to make do, seize my own independence and take care of myself.

I was stuck with a man who barely seemed able to remember who I was, who parroted the same pet name like a sinking ship sending the same signal over and over. All I could do was work around him: hide my powers, sign my own school truancy forms, ignore his ignorance-driven pleadings about cell phones and obtain my own.

My greatest fear was that I was just another iteration of the same thing. I didn't want his broken brain, his failing morals, or his useless self-hate. I spent hours looking in the mirror, tracing my hair, my posture, my face, and trying to see my mother in each of them. She was the platonic ideal, marred only by her understandable decision to drive into traffic to finally escape my father's soul-sucking presence.

I jumped over the front step and ran off to the bus stop.

Winslow High. A bastion of institutionalized violence. A place where a bully could be a bully and face no consequences. Where grades mattered more to transfer paperwork than the demons one was fleeing from.

I could have been a refugee, but instead I was a victim, a prisoner, trapped by my own former best friend and a corrupt administration that not only allowed her behavior but seemed to encourage it.

Anger and hate boiled under my skin, but I kept it at bay. People walked around, and sometimes it was hard to resist reaching out and—

Brains are so fragile, and my power was a scalpel, that just one moment of heightened emotion could send slashing down. But I wouldn't. I knew it was wrong. Not even in a moment of panic would I let myself let loose. Not even then would I let my abilities lash out and twist and turn and multiply flesh over and over again, perverting it into some facsimile of humanity, a fractal monster growing ever larger until it had faces and feet and eyes everywhere, hundreds of arms reaching out to grab more victims and fuel its growth.

In the halls, people gave me a wide berth.

The bullied never said much directly to me, but I knew they spread rumors. It was obvious in the way people looked at me, in the way they turned away when I stared at them. I could have let myself be dragged into a whisper war, but I was above that.

I was an iconoclast, a singular island in a sea of mediocrity, forced to suffer in this school of shame and terrible awfulness. I didn't speak to any of the other students, and perhaps that was for the best. When they spoke, their mouths filled with trite expressions. Phrases spilled out, looped in on themselves, repeated over and over and over. Gossip. Celebrity. Nonsense. Bland, empty sentences. They lived and breathed them, spewing words as if they could keep their failures and mediocrity at bay.

In class, I kept a hand in my backpack, feeling that representative of my other life squishing and squirming around as I examined its structure and tweaked it. I tried to find the case that it'd absorbed, tried to map out the traces of changes that had occurred earlier.

"Taylor!" Mr. Gladly called on me. He asked some inane question about Australian politics.

Why would I care? Why would it matter?

History may repeat itself, but geography didn't. To let the tyranny of place choke us and not even discuss that very process would have been a betrayal of the mentor-student relationship—if Gladly had been anything approaching a mentor. He was a government drone, grasping at sunglasses he no longer wore, fingers twitching into in-group gestures but never quite making it there.

Yet, for these ninety minutes, he was my slave master. For this hour and a half, he had power over me, power that I gave him. A social contract that came with stipulations and small text. Non-violence in return for compliance and a million little pieces of busywork. A deal not with the devil but with an excitable bureaucrat.

Classes came and went.

I wasn't cool enough for Gladly, organized enough for Knott, on the same page as Quinlan. Where they wanted steps delineated in order, every little neural firing mapped into text.

My mind made leaps and twirls that they couldn't even imagine, and they still demanded I show my work. They wanted to cut me up, dissect me, slice my brain into micrometer thin slivers and watch as every electrical impulse slowed down to a crawl.

They didn't recognize my talent or notice my struggle, writing me off as a nuisance. Every complaint was brushed off as if it were the ravings of a lunatic. They rejected the fact that grades were a poor reflection of ability. They couldn't see that busywork drags us down like an anchor on a death barge, thrown over and sunk in the face of any opposition, any difference, any true power.

I was a threat, and they wanted to bring me down to the level of everyone else and pull me under, watch me drown in the mollasses of the masses.

The bell rang, and I reluctantly pulled my hand away from my creation and packed up. Leaving class, I ran into Emma.

I was tired of being stepped all over. I was tired of being bullied. I'd thought that turning to caping would give me a release, but out there, I'd just found more of the same. Glory Girl had been just another bully willing to abuse her power and use me as a chew toy, even as she exulted in the applause of the very same people she endangered.

Perhaps it was time for that to change.

Calling Armsmaster had led to a small success. Where I'd expected to be slapped down yet again, I'd instead been given assurances. Small ones, and ones I couldn't confirm for a while, but nevertheless more than I'd ever had before.

I was emboldened. I didn't have to take this lying down.

Before Emma had a chance to even notice me, I walked right up to her. "Hello, Emma," I said.

"Yes, Hebert?" She glanced up at me, and I used the distraction to slide right in front of her.

"I used to be your best friend."

"Yeah... I've got class," she said and tried to slip past me. I blocked her way.

"It's lunchtime, Emma. I know what you're doing."

She smiled, but it was more of a grimace. I could see it in the lines of her face, the disdain, the distaste. What happened to my old friend?

"Are you going to go spread more rumors about me?"

She sighed.

That was as much confirmation as anything.

I remembered the old days, when we'd play capes and robbers, dressing up our toys in elaborate outfits, acting out fantasies of power, of our wills crushing tiny worlds into their proper shapes.

She'd been the perfect follower, enamored by my charms and pulled into my orbit. She'd seen my cunning and my potential, and she'd latched onto it.

What had caused us to drift apart so much? What had caused her to unmoor from me, and float off, only to heap abuse back my way, whisper behind my back, turn people against me, make this school even more of a prison?

Perhaps I could save it. Perhaps we could go back to the way things were meant to be.

"Emma, we can still turn this around."

She didn't look up at me, staring off into the distance. I could feel the guilt radiate off her, the sheer waves of failure and distaste.

What was holding her there, so far from my friendship? I'd just opened up my arms to her, and she'd done nothing.

"I see," I said.

"Hebert, could you please get out—"

"No, Emma. I'm done with your shit."

"Just—"

"No."

I wouldn't stand for this sort of bullying, but I also wouldn't push back. The dark image rose in my mind again, a warning that I had to hold back. That I had to tiptoe around the bugs at school to avoid stepping on them. It would have been so easy to just go _Prince of Darkness_ on the school and let loose an insidious creeping influence on the school, possessing students one by one, a chain of malice and revenge and gory explosions into cockroaches.

I was better than that. I was above that sort of abuse. I would take the bullying and put on a brave face.

But sometimes it was hard.

When Emma played these emotional games, digging into my sides with pointed words, empty stares, and strategic silences. She wanted to get a rise out of me, to hold back just long enough that I'd build up a full head of steam so that she could use that as some pretense to attack.

I couldn't allow it. I had to stay calm.

A friend of hers butted in. "Hey, Emma, you wanna come—"

I couldn't allow this. "Excuse me," I said. "I'm speaking to Emma here."

"Well, she wanted—"

"Yes, but right now we're in the middle of a discussion. There's no need to be so rude," I said sweetly.

She wilted. "I just—"

"No." I frowned at the friend as she sidled up next to me.

Emma spoke up again. "I do need to go." She slipped to the side, using her friend as a shield to stop me from keeping her here or even seeing where she was going.

Before I could get my bearings and follow her, she'd already gotten lost in the crowd.

"Leave her alone," her friend told me, and walked off in a different direction. As if I wasn't the victim here. It made my blood boil.

Streams of students moved like pheromone-driven ants, mindless drones just looking for that next stash of sugar. I put my head down and dove into them, letting them guide me to the lunchroom.

I passed by a security guard talking on his radio, making sure to look away so he wouldn't have any excuse to stop me. He paid me no heed.

There was a table in the corner that was always available, so I slunk over to it and sat down.

There'd been no lasagna left over, so I'd brought a pita wrap. It was crunchy, burnt, and yet somehow still soggy. Islands of blackened flatbread swam in a sea of flaky pita bread. Dad hadn't been grocery shopping, so there was no meat to distract from the scabrous dough. I'd doubled up on lettuce to compensate, using every part of the last romaine heart in the fridge, leaving me biting into a moist, bitter meal.

All was saved by perfect, juicy cubes of tomato.

I savored the meal even as I looked around my empty table and filled the six empty seats with imaginary companions.

Someone to sit next to me. We'd trade foods, embarking on covert sallies into each other's territory to pick off stranded french fries. Grins and crooked elbows would serve as defense, hostilities ceasing as we signed ceasefire treaties with hugs and laughter.

When in a more serious mood, I'd talk to the girl across from me. We'd debate, sometimes about important issues facing the world—issues that I'd one day have to shoulder—sometimes about trivialities, inane calculations and weekend plans. Arguments would escalate, but they wouldn't ever feel hurtful or fill with subtle pokes and jabs meant only to tear me down.

The other three seats could round out the group. Orbiters to throw in an occasional thought, to fetch nice things, and gives us a laser tag team to die for. A family of my own, with none of the pain and negligence of the one I was born and trapped into.

I thought back to the excitement of the other night, to the brief moments of rapport I'd felt interacting with Firefly. She'd actually listened instead of running away at the first possible moment. We'd managed to talk for hours before the PRT arrived to take away the criminals I'd taken down.

I almost wanted to hope that there was still a chance. Maybe Glory Girl would be taken away, and I could get Firefly to see the light, peel her off and finally have a friend again.

My mind continued swirling down that lonely drain until I heard a familiar voice raised in protest at the entrance of the cafeteria. I looked over to see Firefly arguing with the security guard.

I plunged a hand into my bag, feeling the still somewhat convulsing material of my suit. It had calmed down a bit, the structure having settled a bit. I'd have to examine it later.

For now, I split a ball of moist flesh off and a bit split off and held it under the table, reforming it to mimic a bat's ear. I tried to position it to get a better read on what Firefly and the guard were saying. I snaked a rope of flesh up to my ear and created a tiny biological speaker.

"—to pick someone up," Firefly was saying to the security guard.

"What, another cape?" the guard asked. I ducked and kept my face hidden, pretending to be engrossed in my imaginary conversations and food.

"No, no, nothing like that. Just someone relevant to an ongoing investigation," she mumbled out, managing to not stumble too much over any of her words.

"Alright, sure. Whatever."

I looked up to see her rushing over to me, looking wild-eyed, hair somehow even more frazzled than before. It seemed to whip and billow and tangle around her shoulders. Corkscrews of frizz shot off in every direction, nauseatingly tangled and unkempt.

Her baggy clothes mirrored mine, and in the light of day I felt a sort of kinship that I hadn't felt in a long time.

She even had her hoodie strategically positioned so that she could easily pull it up and over her face. She gave off a vibe of dour disinterest, her whole ensemble rubbing the world's face in its failures regarding her, like a dog owner rubbing their pet's face in shit in a futile attempt to teach it a lesson.

She stopped in front of me, barely looking down at my food. Her half-lidded, asymmetric eyes searched for something that she clearly needed. I couldn't tell if this was the hungry look of an addict or that of a scientist who'd finally had their eureka moment. Was I about to become her supplier or her experiment? I didn't want either. I wanted nothing to do with her, dreams of kinship aside.

She reigned in her impulses for a moment and looked at me.

I stared back impassively. "Yes?" I spat out, jaw clenched.

"Is it—" she began.

"What?" I shot back.

"No, the—I mean, uh, my sister." Her lopsided mouth worked overtime to get the words out.

"The one who tried to kill me?" I snarled.

"Look, she's in trouble. The Protectorate—"

"I don't care. I don't want to hear it," I retorted.

"Please. We need someone to testify—"

"Why are you here, Firefly?" I hissed. The cafeteria seemed just a little quieter than it had before. "Why? Just to show that you know more than my face? That you know where I go to school? That you can track me down this easily?"

She teetered backwards, looking like she was having trouble balancing her acne-ridden face on her body. "It's the suit."

"You can detect it? I thought you had a limited range? Or did you come by Winslow just to look for it?" I parried.

"No! Well, yes. I needed to—to see it again.

I still had a hand in my bag, feeling the contortions pick up. As Firefly came closer, it began to convulse harder.

She was edging closer to the bag, all thoughts of her sister forgotten now that she was so close to my creation. She looked enthralled, utterly captivated, a mortal reaching for ambrosia. I swept my bag to the side, away from her greedy hands.

A massive explosion shook the school. Bits of plaster and dust rained down, polluting my pita wrap and messing up my hair.

Everyone panicked.


	4. Germinal 1-4

The ceiling shook as another explosion boomed out. Shouts rang out around us.

I looked up at Firefly. Her eyes were wide open, taking it all in, but still straying back to my suit.

"We have to go," I said, straining to make my voice heard over the din.

"Huh?" she managed.

"We have to help!"

"Yeah," she said, in a bit of a daze, the closeness of my suit overtaking her mind.

"Do you know where it exploded?"

Her eyes refocused as she looked at me, her hair blowing in the wind of the hundreds of students trying to move towards the door. "A few blocks away?"

"Cool. Let's go," I told her.

"Where?"

"To the site of the explosion," I said. "We have to—"

She shook her head. "How do you think we'll be able to help?"

"Well—" I started, but a pair of guys in football uniforms ran into me. I stumbled against a wall just to feel it shake again.

I got to my feet and tried to speak again. "You can search for—"

"What?" she yelled, interrupting me.

The school shook again. I tried to get closer to her so I could speak, but only managed to get sucked into the crowd. After bobbing under the current through half a hallway, I resurfaced by making my way to a wall.

Looking around, I quickly spotted Firefly's unkempt hair in the crowd. I dove back in, ignoring curses and complaints to shove my way to her.

"We have to get out!" I shouted, and grabbed her wrist. My power pulsed into her skin, tracing neurons up to her head, but I stopped it before it could repeat the same message in her mind.

She looked at me uncomfortably, but didn't resist. I pulled her to the side.

"Okay," I said, still holding onto that warm circle of wrist. "First, we have to get out of school."

I couldn't hear her response, but through the contact we had, I could read it directly from her brain. _I can't h—_

I didn't let her finish the thought. "Yes you can. I know the way!"

With a jerk I pulled her into the crowd. I knew the school's structure well, so I took the fastest route through halls and down stairs, through masses of panicking students.

We ducked into a side corridor. "This is a shortcut!" I yelled.

Here we could run faster, unimpeded by the flood. The corridor stretched out, past empty classrooms and dropped backpacks, until it turned to the left. We kept going. It turned left again, and we found ourselves back in the crowd.

Firefly shouted something and my power translated it through her wrist to _Thanks!_

"No problem!" I yelled.

The student body spilled out through the front doors and into the parking lot.

"Okay, now's our chance," I told Firefly. Looking in her head, I could mostly see static, noise. She hadn't heard me.

It didn't matter. I tightened my grip on her wrist and pulled her towards the road, where we could escape. This finally got her attention, and she looked at me meaningfully. _What?_ I parsed out from the bare twitching of her brainwaves.

"We have to go!" I said and tugged harder. "Look, Firefly—"

Before I could explain, we heard someone shouting over the din, and she turned her attention toward them.

"Everyone settle down!" A security guard yelled out over the crowd of people. At first it didn't take. He repeated himself a few times and each shout seemed to quiet the crowd down further. "This is not a drill," he added to the last repetition. "However, it is also not a call to panic. We will be moving to the track. You do not have permission to leave."

They were rounding us up into a giant pen, trapping us all together in one neat group, easy to take out with a single explosion. I could see teachers lurking on the outskirts of the crowd, watching should someone try to escape, hemming us in and forcing us to move along. Claustrophobia began to set in. I watched the skies for missiles and scanned the grass for mines.

Whether by malice or incompetence, the school staff had created the perfect death trap.

The security guard continued to talk, telling us to keep calm, encouraging us to take deep breaths and think happy thoughts. That it would all be over soon.

The crowd stayed in one place, but its constituents milled about. People stood, sat, walked by. Sometimes they'd brush by me, and in a flash of my power I'd see inside them. Skin, flesh, bones, and most of all blood.

Blood pumping through their bodies. Blood heating up as the Spring day warmed us. Blood that I couldn't help but imagine splattered all over me, all over everything around me, slick and congealing in a tiny dark space I couldn't leave.

I was brought back to the circumstances surrounding my moment of transformation.

One day, right before lunch started, I slipped out and went to find somewhere to hide. All I wanted was to eat my pita wrap away from Emma and her cronies, in relative safety, under a blanket of loneliness. Nobody followed me, so I thought I was safe, but it turned out my tormentors were a step ahead of me.

On the third floor, in an out of the way corridor, there was a broom closet that I'd often walked by. I'd noticed earlier in the day that it had been left ajar, so during lunch I snuck up to it and entered, closing the door behind me so nobody else could join.

It was almost cozy at first. The darkness reminded me of my mother's hair, and I let it embrace me.

I stood there in that cramped janitor's closet for a while, just munching on my pita wrap. I had just enough space to not have to touch anything, though if I leaned back, I could feel the hard plastic rim of some receptacle against my back. The only thing that bothered me was the smell coming from behind, a trash can that some lazy janitor hadn't yet dealt with properly.

Time ticked onward, and I continued to relax, drifting through the well-stocked pantry of my thoughts.

The pita wrap slowly disappeared, and I threw the wrapper into the closet behind me. Standing up, I stretched. Lunch was almost over. Time to slink back to class.

The door didn't budge. The handle turned, but nothing clicked. It wouldn't open. I pushed with a shoulder, bashed it with my fists, even dug my fingernails into the frame, all to no avail.

I was trapped.

As my struggles weakened and the severity of my situation caught up to me, I realized what had happened. _They_ knew where I was going to go, how I hid away during lunch, how I searched for new spots each day. The door had been left ajar on purpose. They'd set it up so I'd get trapped in this peripheral closet.

I wasn't going to let them get away with this. I would get out.

First, I needed tools. I felt around the enclosed space. To my right, a bare wall and my backpack, which contained an art project that I refused to ruin. To my left, I could feel a series of mostly empty shelves. A few bottles, a bucket. A textbook. Nothing else.

I grabbed the bottles and twisted them all open. Kneeling down, I poured them out slowly by the bottom of the door, trying to ensure that as much fluid as possible leaked out from under the frame and into the hallway. If there was a big enough spill, maybe someone would investigate.

No sounds from the outside. I put my ear against the wood of the door and listened closely. Still nothing.

I tried banging the bucket against the door, hoping it would make be louder than my fist.

I opened the textbook and tried to jam a sliver of its cover into the doorframe, trying to imitate the credit card trick I'd seen in movies. It wouldn't fit.

Stepping back from the door, I bumped into the smelly trash can I'd been ignoring. It jostled.

There are moments in life where it feels like the rules have changed. Old support structures show their age. Foundations that looked solid just the other day become cracked, crumble, and turn to dust. Things fall apart, and you're left spinning in the void, reaching out for absolutely anything to hold on to, to end that dizzying drop, to regain stability at any cost.

I turned around and plunged my hands into the trash can. I pulled out bits of trash, searching for anything useful.

Paper towels, crumpled up essays, a torn up shirt, and lots and lots of tampons and sanitary pads. I threw everything by the door, looking desperately for something to help me either break the door or pick the lock.

A piece of wood turned out to be balsa wood. It broke almost immediately when applied to the frame of the door. Soggy books were useless. The remnants of someone's lunch squished as I dug it out.

The can was empty. I'd even removed the bag. And yet, I still didn't have what I was looking for. I looked around. There was a possibility, however slim, that a lockpick or bobby pin or _something useful_ had slipped into the pile of used tampons and pads I'd discarded, as I hadn't opened any of them up.

I shuffled a foot over to the pile of feminine sewage and plucked a used sanitary pad from the pile. It was folded up, sticky side keeping it closed. I licked a finger and then dug a fingernail into the flap, slowly peeling it open. Close examination revealed blood and nothing else.

I threw it to the side and grabbed another. It reeked, smelling like the months-old remains of a rotting half-aborted fetus. I didn't—couldn't—care. I opened it up.

The pile by my side grew as the one in front of me shrank. Some were sealed shut, some were throw in just loosely folded over. One was inverted, blood side out. I tried to get as little blood on myself as possible, picking at it slowly and holding it away from me. Another was a mass of bloody wet toilet paper that I had to unravel bit by bit only to find nothing inside.

Over time the motions became natural. I found the rhythm, my fingers flashing across seams and under folds, quickly dancing over bloody spots and around weakened cotton.

I was covered in rancid blood, plastered with trash, and soaked in a foul mixture of cleaning supplies and moist garbage, but it was all worth it when I finally found a paperclip stuck in a spot of congealed blood.

All my struggles had not been in vain. I was saved. I took the clip to the door and felt out where the lock was. Unbending the paperclip, I pushed it into the mechanics and turned. No click.

I pulled it out and examined it closer. It was bent even further, the tip I'd inserted scratched up and rough. I drew a fingernail over it. The material parted easily.

This wasn't a metal clip. It was _plastic_.

I had all these materials around me, and yet there was nothing I could use. _If only I could make something,_ I thought. _If only…_

And then I broke.

My mind shattered like a mirror that could no longer hold its own reflection. Fingernails dug into the wood of the door, I felt my very self seized by transformative convulsions.

DESTINATION

In the v̧o̢įd͘ there is no darkness and no light. There is no I, no y͘o͟u̴, no distinction between the world and its constituents. Should there be floating, it will be ur-floating, divorced from subject, beyond platonic. Should there be infinity, it will be incomprehensible, not just in the layman's understanding, but in all possible understandings: an infinity that formal systems could not capture nor could their inability to do so be captured. Should there be power or dimensionality or structure of any sort, it will exist in the space beyond conceivable reason, more elemental and atomic than the base it purports to be built on.

This s̸ce̛ne̶ ͝exists beyond time, in the neverending present, but it is not static. It ripples. Extralinguistic whispers permeate it, susurrations from a space beyond order.

 _A twist of nature curled in,_

 _And tore my mind to pieces,_

 _Leaving thoughts worn quite thin._

 _A twist of nature cu͝r͏le̸d in,_

 _Squirmed and struggled from within,_

 _Worming its way into mental creases._

 _A twist of nature curled in,_

 _And tore my mind to pieces._

From this bubbling mi͢a͏s̶ma͞ of pure being, there rose into existence restrictions and language and objects and finally—in lurching motions, piece by piece, id, ego, superego—an I.

I felt unfettered, ųnb̨o͠und by earthly forces, drawn into the center of things into the place before coloration, shape, or even distinction.

In my sight: an orb of light illuminating nothing.

In my ears: the rattle of the upper range of a voice so d̕e͘e͢p͟ that most of what I thought I could hear, I was really feeling in the shaking of my bones. It imparted wisdom so wise that it couldn't be understood.

In my mind: the recurring impression of something v͏a̛st.

All around me: rhythmic pulsating. The universe squeezing and _contracting_. Pushing and pushing until it could push me out covered in blood and guts, but not just covered—I was becoming the waste splattered over m̨e.

AGREEMENT

It was like breathing for the first time. Rebirth, g̵͡ơ͡r͠͞͏y̛ ̢͘and good.

 _In blood I saw it_

 _And from b̡́ĺ̡͞o̶̕͢͝͠o̧͞d҉̛̛̕ ̸̶̛͘͡I drew it forth_

 _To blood it returns_

It became clear that the universe was much b̵͘̕i͠g͟g͟͠e͏̀r ̸͜than I'd expected. I could see myself as a speck on a planet assaulted by the questing tendril of an e̡͘l̨͜͞ḑ̢͜e͠r͘͟ ̀god. The planet shrank to a point, but the tendril seemed unchanged. Solar systems, galaxies, clusters, whole dimensions shrank, becoming inconsequential relative to the tremendous _t̵h͜i͠ǹg̀_ reaching into them.

It seemed to blossom, like the p҉e̴tal̴s̛ ͟of a flower folded too tightly for even higher geometry to comprehend opening up and twisting through d̕i̴men̛sio͡ǹs̕ in dizzying ways.

My mind was flooded with imagery, voices, conçepţş, but most of all by a sense of sheer scale. I wasn't sure what I was looking at yet, but I could tell that it was big. Large. H͘͢ų̷̢͏g̢̨̕è̸͠! Sizes beyond the bounds of language and its pitiful allowance of synonyms.

 _A set grew bigger_

 _Complete and closed, it o͏̨҉ú̀t̵̨̛͜͝ṕ̡a̡͡c̷̸͝ę̵̛́d̵̢́͘_

 _All fast-growing functions_

The orb in my vision grew from point to particle. Still, its light did not fall on anything, only becoming brighter and brighter, until it flashed white and I was transported out of self and time into zéi͢͞t̵͟g̕e̶i̷̕st̸̶s long gone.

My senses came back in stuttering st̍ͩ̓ë̄̎p̒ͩ͒̐̈́̓sͤ͐.

Creatures and cultures flooded my mind, their roles and behaviors and uses. They were machines to subvert. I could see rains of shards falling upon them and imbuing them with power. An elongated zebra-like creature lifted up into the air. Another unleashed beams of f͘͠i͝r̨e̶̡̧. A third collapsed into a puddle and swallowed all who came near.

 _Fields of ashen shame_

 _S͟҉̕w̢̢͡i̛͢r̴l̸e̴d͘͞҉ ̷͝up by torrential rains_

 _Drift down around me_

Eighteen limbed reptilian creatures toiled under the ģ̵̧́ļ͜͠҉ơ̵̸w̶̷͡ ̨̀͘of two blue stars. They began to evolve, some turning different colors, others twisting into even more alien shapes, and wars broke out. Flashes of power, attempts to destroy, to win, all pushing understanding ever further, until eventually they stopped being useful.

In the distance, go̧l̷d͞ a͜nd ̴silv̶er̀ r͡an ţo͡g̸e͘t̵her͏ iń t̸h̨e̶ s̕ky. They looked up only to have the ground beneath them crack, split, and tear in two. They fell into crevasses, past rocks, over magma.

The world was torn asunder, flash-fried, and detonated, its energy consumed to fuel the next rotation of the g̢҉ŕ̨͏aņ̸d͟ ҉̢ç̵y̧c̡l̕͞e̴̕.

TRAGE҉CTORY

What was left was the remainder of what had once been but was n̨̢͜͠o̶ more. It overflowed with properties cleaved from the lost whole that birthed it, existing in self-similar forms reminiscent of themselves.

In shape and geometry, it moved and was as it had always been for the meagre ţ̴̧͇̩͚͇̜͔͢ͅi͏̛͉͖̙͈̙̮̺͖̫̟͢͡ͅm҉͔̭̘̖͖̭̥̣̪͍̻͍͉͙͉͜e̪̫͎̜͈͇̳͔̘̥̝͟͡ͅ ̷̢̢̡̣̪̥͈͕̞̹͓̲͉̭̫̗̣it had existed. Its flattenings identified with its projections. Its lines and edges and curves stood stark against each other, defining an outline that corresponded to what it looked like.

Imagine a silhouette given depth and colored in,̀͋̍͋ͫě̡́x͊ͪ͑̈̓͛ͯt͂ͧͪ͑͏r͊̑̔ͬ̃ͭͭ͏u̷͌ͯ̑̈́d̷ed̄́ ̑̏̐̈͒̊͏iͧ̍̊n̨͂͒͑t̅ͬͣ͗͐ͨ̀ö͂͑̔ ͥ̑ͧ͢th̃͛͛̐̚e̓͋͆̀ t̴̆ͣͬhͮ͗̓͗̐̅i̷ṙͦ͢d͂̓͒̒͋ ̸̓̀͋ͦͯd̓̓ͪ̎i̿̑ͦ̐ͥ̎̊m̧͛̑̃̆͛e͛̑ͦͦͨns͏i̧ͥͦ͗͆oͯñ̀̅̎ͯ and furnished with reflection and hue and texture. Now allow that silhouette the motion of a puppet, but make the strings invisible and smooth out every jerk until it looks natural and apply physical forces to the construction to further embed it in our w̨̡͞ơr̸̛̕͞l͘͠d̵̕͟.

This is what I saw.

 _The land_

 _On which I grew_

 _The daisies of my youth_

 _Has collapsed and gone away now._

 _G̤͔ͩ̉̂̎r̛̫̬̞̍ͯo̹̐ͦ̋̾̚͜w̓͆̆ͧͦ̽͏̮ ͩ̉ͮ̑̍̂͆u̟̩͕p̫̙̦̉͛ͧ͌̂ͪ._

 _In flesh and blood and guts I see_

 _A future and maybe,_

 _With some luck, a_

 _Present._

I floated in a cage of light, overwhelmed by the brightness of my visions. G҉̶o̷̧d͘s҉̵͟ ̨͘̕reached their unwashed hands into m͜͝y̢ ̸b̵͠ra̶ín̕͜ and shuffled the neurons around, turning r̵o̶̡̕ţ̷͝t̴͠i̛͠n̵g̶̡ ̧j̵e͜l҉l̷͡ý͘ into sacred instruments of destruction. Moist noises squirmed their way to the front of my skull and poked at my eyes until they bled with tears.

Deep murmurings rose in pitch until I could _un͝d̷er̡s̛ta̛nd͟ them_.

 **Taylor H̨̕͜e̷̢͢͜͞r̡b̸̀ę̶͢͜͝r̸̴̛̀͡t̶̨̨̨͢.**

That wasn't right. I'm Hebert.

 **Nevertheless. Are you in the market for s̸̢̀͟ư̵̧͜ṕ̡͟͡e̸͜r͏̴҉̕ń̢̡͘͝a̧̛t̸̢̡͟u͠͏̢r̸̡̛͟͠a̶̛l̶͏̛͏ ̵̴̢̡͞á̴̷b̸̷i̷͡l̶̶̛͢i͝͏̡t̸̀͜͟i̶̶̢͢҉é̸͟͟s̢̀͘͠?**

None of this made any sense. I swept my hand through time and space and banished the hallucination in a sho **wer of glittering st** ars. It was false, and distracted me from the t̜̼̦̳͍̤̱̺̼̞͚r͖͕̦̬͈̤̗̦̟̣̯͚̗̠͉̮u͓̠̖͍̻̫͍͔̞̤̙̥e̲͔̪̟̻͙̹͓̩̠ ̩͓̗̫̪̦̪͍̹̯̬͔̫̫̫ͅv̮͓̣̦͔̟̤̖̫̺ị̳̯͇̟s̜̖̱̥̥͖̥͓̲i͖͕͙̣̮̭̱̲̼̪̗͓̙͉͓o̭̙̥̞̥̻̬̱̟̠n̞̜̼̟̦̟̣͕s̹͈̱͎̬͖̖̩̝̪͍̮̞͓ͅ around me.

The symbols whirling around me began to slow and drift closer. _Transcendence_. I could almost see the— **help** —end of it all. Already my memory was beginning to f̧̡͘͡a҉̨́d̷͝͝e͏́҉, the co͜r̨r̶up͞ti̢ng ͏fi͝n̷gers of a̴͞ ̴̢̡d̸̷̸҉r̵͜é͡ą̸d entity rea̡͢c̴̢̡hing into my mind, silencing diss **It hurts oh it hurts** ent and knowledge.

I tried to hold onto it all tighter, but time seemed to granulate an̷d̀͟ ͜͟p̸̶̢͜o̷̧͠w̷̶d̡̡̢͟͞er, becoming finer and finer until it sliped throug̵̶h̵҉̛m̷̡͡y͏҉͡f̡̕͟͟͝ingers.

The lights around me were accelerating, all towards me. Time-space bent _bent_ **bent** in, hunching over me and f̡҉o̡͟͡l͞͠d͘i͠n̵͢͝g ̡o̷͝v̸̢e͠͡ŗ҉͏ ì̀t̶̴ş͟e̸l͝f́͞. Sounds moved from external to internal until they come to consume were smOtHe̴͘r̵ed.

Two absolute units circled around each other. A m̶atìng̵ p̨a̧i̧r͞.

It—all—collapsed—to—a—point.

 _In dreams_

 _I see m̴y̧ ́wants_

 _They whisper so s̴̴̛oftĺ͢y̸҉̢_

 _All I need to f̢̛̹̥̩̤̹̘͇͢͠į̡̧͈̞̠͔̦͔̠͎̜͖̙̘͈̥̹͘͢ǹ͚̭͈͎̥̩͝d͜͏̯̠̺͙͇̯̪͖̙̠̠̲͇̦͓̖ͅ ̸̸̪͖̫̗͟͢in life is_

 _Power_

 _Unstoppable giants to lay low_

 _A little fame and f̷o̶̸̕r͞t̷͟u̸n͘͢͜e͝ ̀͡_

 _Please just come and_

 _H̨̨̕͡e̷̢͘ļ̛̀͘p͟͏̶͟ ̷̴̨̢̢ḿe͞͠_

E _ve_ r **yth** ing is s҉mearing apart a͏g͝ai̢n̕. Th t y that I sahelpw, that I glimps̴ed for t̶̡͞h҉̵̧͠é̕͞͡͏ ̶́barThey're here they're hereest of mo **men** ts, is yet again turning to̡̕͝͡ ̴̛҉̕ḑ́͝ust. Time it _self ha_ s fallen **apa** rt, leav̴̴̡͞i̸̵͜ǹ͡g̵̡͠ ͢͟m̕͏̛e alone once m _or_ e in the ete **rna** lpre͜͟͏̛ś̢ȩ̸͡nt.

Stars coa _lesc_ e into being, but they only manno ş̷̛́҉t̵͜҉o̕̕͟͢͢ṕ̷̛́ ̕҉pleaseage to doom us all spell out letters. A great big **contract** in the sky, drawn up by some d̴̕e̸̡ì̷͟͠t̴̨͞͝y̕͢҉͘, my signature _already_ _forged_ _on it_. Power for a͇ͧ̊̃ͨ ̴̘̗̫̟̘͍͉ͨ̆ͭ̾̿͑l̋̌̌ͤ̑̃ì̝̩̰̈̃̚t͕̮̲̰̳̖̋̄ṯ̗͖͚̣̦̙̑̿̒͒ͬ̾̇͞ĺ͆̍͑̐̋͛͏͖͍e̟̍̐̋ͭ͊͝ ̰̤̜͔̦̃̔̍͘b̧͇ͮ̌̐i͐̔̈́̔̿t̷̩̘̦̼͌͆͆ ̇̽̈́͛ő̢͓̱̘͕̖͊f̹ͨͦͧ̓ free will. So many lonely stars.

Nothing but balls of ᴘᴀʟᴇ ʟɪɢʜᴛ all around. I can't—he **l** **p me** —They flash into som _ **ALL IS LOST**_ ething. I'm ununun _ab_ le to sţ̸̷͟o̷̶͝͠p. The great maw of a beast. Opening. Oᴘᴇɴɪɴɢ! It's coming. I want to stop it, to eɴᴅ ᴛʜᴇ ᴄʏcle to cu—r̛҉̸a̵̷̴̵í̸̷͟ǹ̵͝s̡̕͜͡͝ ҉͡b́͢͜͝l̀͟͝͏e҉͜͜͠e͟͢d̴̕ì́̀n̸̵̕͡͠g̕͜ ̨̢ẃ̧͘͢i̶͠͏̧̨t҉̡͘͢͟h͏̵̛͠ ͘͟͠p̸̨ _ower a_ _ **nd unholy enligh**_ **tenmen** t—t it off (ᴀɴʏᴛʜɪɴɢ).

The final que **nch** ing. It's ((over. In̴̶̴̕͢s̸̢͝͏ide) **the mo** uth). _s-so beautiful_ He **l** p. Growing drEAd. thestars wink out. Fͭͮ͆i̐ͨ̇ͫ̂rͥ͐̈́ͦéͮ. Sin _after_ _ **s̸̢i̧ņ́͜ ̡**_ _ **after**_ _ **s̷̷̡͟i̛ņ̧̛͠͞ ̛͜҉flowing**_ —e̷ń̨́͞d̢͞҉̨l̴̷̨̕͠e̸̡̛͜s̶̕s̵͠͡—noNoNOno **o** th̸̳͍̹̰͈̩̰̻̖͇̕͜i̶͇͓̰̬̖͍̩̣̙̭̮̼͍͢͝͝ͅn҉̷̡̞̩̦̳̬͠͡g. I **open** my e̕͜y҉̡̡e̶͜͏͢͝s͏̵̷͜.

AGREEMENT

When I came to in the closet again, I had powers.

This time, there would be no janitor to come and unlock the door for me. I turned to Firefly. "We need to get out there and stop whoever is bombing my city."

She still didn't look convinced. "Your—"

"You'll get to examine the suit a bit more if you come with me," I added.

She blinked at me and took a deep breath. "Okay."

People milled about. Teachers circled around, some standing, some pacing. What mattered was keeping in mind their fields of vision, which way they faced, what they actually looked at.

If we moved slowly, and made sure to stay out of line of sight, we should be able to get out. The problem was that the distance from the center of the field to the nearest bleachers was empty. Grass, running track, concrete, bleachers. Nothing to hide behind.

We needed a distraction, and since we didn't have anything to make one with, we needed a patsy. Emma wasn't around, lost somewhere in the crowd, but I found a gullible teacher.

"Excuse me, Mr. G," I said.


End file.
